santos, b. nuestra america theory culture & society
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BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS University of Coimbra (Portugal) University of Wisconsin-Madison (bsantos@ces.uc.pt; bsantos@facstaff.wisc.edu)
NUESTRA AMERICA
REINVENTING A SUBALTERN PARADIGM
OF RECOGNITION AND REDISTRIBUTION*
* Acknowledgments I would like to thank Diane Soles and Luis Carlos Arenas, my research assistants, for their help. My thanks also to Maria Irene Ramalho for her comments and editorial revisions.
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The European American Century
According to Hegel, we recall, universal history goes from the East to the West.
Asia is the beginning, while Europe is the ultimate end of universal history, the place
where the civilizational trajectory of humankind is fulfilled. The biblical and
medieval idea of the succession of empires (translatio imperii) becomes in Hegel the
triumphal way of the Universal Idea. In each era a people takes on the responsibility
of conducting the Universal Idea, thereby becoming the historical universal people, a
privilege which has in turn passed from the Asian to the Greek, then to the Roman,
and, finally, to the German peoples. America, or rather, North America, carries, for
Hegel, an ambiguous future, in that it does not collide with the utmost fulfilling of the
universal history in Europe. The future of (North) America is still a European future,
made up of Europe's left-over population.
This Hegelian idea underlies the dominant conception of the twentieth century as
the American century: the European American Century. Herein implied is the notion
that the americanization of the world, starting with the americanization of Europe
itself, is but an effect of the European universal cunning of reason, which, having
reached the Far West and unreconciled with the exile to which Hegel had condemned
it, was forced to turn back, walk back upon its own track and once again trace the path
of its hegemony over the East. Americanization, as a hegemonic form of globalization,
is thus the third act of the millennial drama of Western supremacy. The first act, to a
large extent a failed act, was the Crusades, which started the second millennium of the
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Christian era; the second act, beginning halfway through the millennium, was the
discoveries and subsequent European expansion. In this millennial conception, the
European American century carries little novelty; it is nothing more than one more
European century, the last one of the millennium. Europe, after all, has always
contained many Europes, some of them dominant, others dominated. The United
States of America is the last dominant Europe; like the previous ones, it exerts its
uncontested power over the dominated Europes. The feudal lords of eleventh-century
Europe had and desired as little autonomy vis--vis Pope Urban II, who recruited
them for the Cruzades, as the European Union countries today via-a-vis the US of
President Clinton, who recruits them to the Balkan wars.1 From one episode to the
other, only the dominant conception of the dominant West has been restricted. The
more restrictive the conception of the West, the closer the East. Jerusalem is now
Kosovo.
In these conditions it is hard to think of any alternative to the current regime of
international relations which has become a core element of what I call hegemonic
globalization. However, such an alternative is not only necessary but urgent, since the
current regime, as it looses coherence, becomes more violent and unpredictable, thus
enhancing the vulnerability of subordinate social groups, regions and nations. The real
danger, both as regards intranational and international relations, is the emergence of
what I call societal fascism. Fleeing from Germany a few months before his death,
Walter Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Theory of History (1980) prompted by the
idea that European society lived at the time a moment of danger. I think that today we
1 On the relations between the Pope and the feudal lords concerning the Crusades, see Gibbon (1928, vol. 6: 31)
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live in a moment of danger as well. In Benjamin's time the danger was the rise of
fascism as a political regime. In our time, the danger is the rise of fascism as a societal
regime. Unlike political fascism, societal fascism is pluralistic, coexists easily with
the democratic state, and its privileged time-space, rather than being national, is both
local and global.
Societal fascism is a set of social processes by which large bodies of populations
are irreversibly kept outside or thrown out of any kind of social contract (Santos,
1998a). They are rejected, excluded and thrown into a kind of Hobbesian state of
nature, either because they have never been part of any social contract and probably
never will (I mean the pre-contractual underclasses everywhere in the world, the best
example of which are probably the youth of urban ghettos); or because they have been
excluded or thrown out of whatever social contract they had been part of before (I
mean the post-contractual underclasses, millions of workers of post-fordism, peasants
after the collapse of land-reform projects or other development projects).
As a societal regime, fascism manifests itself as the collapse of the most trivial
expectations of the people living under it. What we call society is a bundle of
stabilized expectations from the subway schedule to the salary at the end of the month
or employment at the end of college education. Expectations are stabilized by a set of
shared scales and equivalences: for a given work a given pay, for a given crime a
given punishment, for a given risk a given insurance. The people that live under
societal fascism are deprived of shared scales and equivalences and therefore of
stabilized expectations. They live in a constant chaos of expectations in which the
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most trivial acts may be met with the most dramatic consequences. They run many
risks and none of them is insured. Gualdino Jesus, a Patax Indian from Northeast
Brazil, symbolizes the nature of such risks. He had come to Brazilia to take part in the
march of the landless. The night was warm and he decided to sleep on a bench at the
bus stop. At the early morning hours he was killed by three middle-class youths, one,
son of a judge, and the other, of an army officer. As the youngsters confessed later on
to the police, they killed the Indian for the fun of it. They didn't even know he was
an Indian, they thought he was a homeless vagrant. This event is mentioned here as a
parable of what I call societal fascism.
One possible future is therefore the spread of societal fascism. There are many
signs that this is a real possibility. If the logic of the market is allowed to spill over
from the economy to all fields of social life and to become the sole criterion for
successful social and political interaction, society will become ungovernable and
ethically repugnant and whatever order is achieved will be of a fascistic kind, as
indeed Schumpeter (1942 [1962]) and Polanyi (1944 [1957]) predicted decades ago.
Important, however, is to bear in mind that, as my example shows, it is not the
state that may become fascistic; social relations both local, national and
international relations may become so. The disjuncture in social relations between
inclusion and exclusion has already gone so deep that it becomes increasingly a spatial
disjuncture: included people live in civilized areas, excluded people in savage areas.
Fences are raised between them (closed condominiums, gated communities). In the
savage zones, because they are potentially ungovernable, the democratic state is
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democratically legitimated to act fascistically. This is more likely to occur the more
unchecked the dominant consensus about the weak state is left. It is today becoming
clear that only a strong democratic state can produce effectively its own weakness, and
that only a strong democratic state can promote the emergence of a strong civil
society. Otherwise, once the structural adjustment is accomplished, rather than with a
weak state we will be confronted with strong mafias, as is today the case of Russia.
In this paper I argue that the alternative to the spread of societal fascism is the
construction of a new pattern of local, national and transnational relations, based both
on the principle of redistribution (equality) and the principle of recognition
(difference). In a globalized world, such relations must emerge as counter-hegemonic
globalizations. The pattern sustaining them must be much more than a set of
institutions. Such pattern entails a new transnational political culture embedded in new
forms of sociability and subjectivity. Ultimately it implies a new revolutionary
natural law, as revolutionary as the seventeenth-century conceptions of natural law
were. For reasons that will soon become clear, I will call this new natural law a
baroque cosmopolitan law.
At the margins of the European American Century, as I argue, another century, a
truly new and American century, emerged. I call it the Nuestra America American
Century. While the former carries the hegemonic globalization, the latter contains in
itself the potential for counter-hegemonic globalizations. Since this potential lies in the
future, the Nuestra America American Century may well be the name of the century
we are now entering. In the first section of my paper I explain what I mean by
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globalization, and particularly counter-hegemonic globalization. Then I specify in
some detail the most outstanding features of the idea of Nuestra America as it
conceived of itself in the mirror of the European American Century. In the following
section I analize the baroque ethos, conceived of as the cultural archetype of Nuestra
America subjectivity and sociability. My analysis highlights some of the emancipatory
potential of a new baroque natural law, conceived of as cosmopolitan law, a law
based neither on God nor on abstract nature, but rather on the social and political
culture of social groups whose everyday life is energized by the need to transform
survival strategies into sources of innovation, creativity, transgression, and subversion.
In the last sections of the paper I will try to show how this emancipatory counter-
hegemonic potential of Nuestra America has so far not been realized, and how it may
be realized in the twenty-first century. Finally, I indentify five areas, all of them
deeply embedded in the secular experience of Nuestra America, which in my view
will be the main contested terrains of the struggle between hegemonic and counter-
hegemonic globalizations, and thus the playing field for a new transnational political
culture and the baroque natural law that legitimates it. In each one of these contested
terrains, the emancipatory potential of the struggles is premised upon the idea that a
politics of redistribution cannot be successfully conducted without a politics of
recognition, and vice-versa.
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On Counter-hegemonic Globalizations
Before I proceed, let me clarify what I mean by hegemonic and counter-
hegemonic globalization. Most authors conceive of one form of globalization only,
and reject the distinction between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic globalization.2
Once globalization is conceived of as being one alone, resistance to it on the part of its
victims granted that it may be possible to resist it at all can only take the form of
localization. Jerry Mander, for example, speaks of ideas about the viability of
smaller-scale, localized diversified economies, hooked into but not dominated by
outside forces (1996: 18). Similarly Douthwaite affirms that [S]ince a local
unsustainability cannot cancel local sustainability elsewhere, a sustainable world
would consist of a number of territories, each of which would be sustainable
independently of the others. In other words, rather than a single global economy which
would damage everyone if it crashed, a sustainable world would contain a plethora of
regional (sub-national) economies producing all the essentials of life from the
resources of their territories and therefore largely independent of each other
(1999:171). According to this view, the shift toward the local is mandatory. It is the
only way of guaranteeing sustainability.
I start from the assumption that what we usually call globalization consists of
sets of social relations; as these sets of social relations change, so does globalization.
There is strictly no single entity called globalization; there are, rather, globalizations,
and we should use the term only in the plural. On the other hand, if globalizations are
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bundles of social relations, the latter are bound to involve conflicts, hence, both
winners and losers. More often than not, the discourse on globalization is the story of
the winners as told by the winners. Actually, the victory is apparently so absolute that
the defeated end up vanishing from the picture altogether.
Here is my definition of globalization: it is the process by which a given local
condition or entity succeeds in extending its reach over the globe and, by doing so,
develops the capacity to designate a rival social condition or entity as local.
The most important implications of this definition are the following. First, in the
conditions of the western capitalist world system there is no genuine globalization.
What we call globalization is always the successful globalization of a given localism.
In other words, there is no global condition for which we cannot find a local root, a
specific cultural embeddedness. The second implication is that globalization entails
localization, that is, localization is the globalization of the loosers. In fact, we live in a
world of localization, as much as we live in a world of globalization. Therefore, it
would be equally correct in analytical terms if we were to define the current situation
and our research topics in terms of localization, rather than globalization. The reason
why we prefer the latter term is basically because hegemonic scientific discourse tends
to prefer the story of the world as told by the winners. In order to account for the
assymetrical power relations within what we call globalization I have suggested
elsewhere that we distinguish four modes of production of globalization: globalized
localisms, localized globalisms, cosmopolitanism, and common heritage of humankind
2 From very different perspectives converge on this Robertson, 1992; Escobar, 1995; Castells, 1996; Mander and Goldsmith, 1996; Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1996; Ritzer, 1996; Chossudovsky, 1997; Bauman,1998;
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(Santos, 1995: 252-377). According to this conception, the two first modes comprise
what we call hegemonic globalization. They are driven by the forces of global
capitalism and characterized by the radical nature of the global integration they make
possible, either through exclusion or through inclusion. The excluded, whether people
or countries, or even continents like Africa, are integrated in the global economy by
the specific ways in which they are excluded from it. This explains why among the
millions of people that live on the streets, in urban ghettos, in reservations, in the
killing fields of Urab or Burundi, the Andean Mountains or the Amazonic frontier, in
refugee camps, in occupied territories, in sweatshops using millions of bonded child
laborers, there is much more in common than we are ready to admit.
The two other forms of globalization cosmopolitanism and common heritage
of humankind are what I call counter-hegemonic globalizations. All over the world
the hegemonic processes of exclusion are being met with different forms of resistance
grassroots initiatives, local organizations, popular movements, transnational
advocacy networks, new forms of labor internationalism that try to counteract
social exclusion, opening up spaces for democratic participation, community building,
alternatives to dominant forms of development and knowledge, in sum, for social
inclusion. These local-global linkages and cross-border activism constitute a new
transnational democratic movement. After the demonstrations in Seattle (November,
1999) against the World Trade Organization and those in Prague (September, 2000)
against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, this movement is
becoming a new component of international politics and, more generally, part of a new
Arrighi and Silver, 1999; Jameson and Miyoshi, 1999;
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progressive political culture. The new local-global advocacy networks focus on a wide
variety of issues: human rights, environment, ethnic and sexual discrimination,
biodiversity, labor standards, alternative protection systems, indigenous rights, etc.
(Casanova, 1998; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Tarrow, 1999; Evans, 2000; Brysk, 2000).
This new activism beyond borders constitutes an emergent paradigm which,
following Ulrick Beck, we could call a transnational, emancipatory sub-politics, the
political Geist of counter-hegemonic globalizations. The credibility of the
transnational sub-politics is still to be established, and its sustainability is an open
question. If we measure its influence and success in light of the following four levels
issue creation and agenda setting; changes in the rhetoric of the decision-makers;
institutional changes; effective impact on concrete policies there is enough
evidence to say that it has been successful in confronting hegemonic globalization at
the two first levels of influence. It remains to be seen how successful it will be, and
within which span of time, at the two last and more demanding levels of influence.
For the purposes of my argument in this paper, two characteristics of
transnational sub-politics must be highlighted at this point. The first one, a positive
one, is that, contrary to the western modern paradigms of progressive social
transformation (revolution, socialism, social-democracy), the transnational sub-politics
is as much involved in a politics of equality (redistribution) as in a politics of
difference (recognition). This does not mean that these two kinds of politics are
equally present in the different kinds of struggles, campaigns, and movements. Some
struggles may privilege a politics of equality. This is the case of campaigns against
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sweatshops or of new movements of labor internationalism. Other struggles, on the
contrary, may privilege a politics of difference, as is the case of some campaigns
against racism and xenophobia in Europe or of some indigenous, aboriginal, and tribal
rights movements in Latin-America, Australia, New Zealand, and India. Still other
struggles may explicitly combine politics of equality with politics of difference. Such
is the case of some other campaigns against racism and xenophobia in Europe,
womens movements throughout the world, and campaigns against the plundering of
biodiversity (or biopiracy), most of it located in indigenous territories, as well as of
most indigenous movements. The articulation between redistribution and recognition
becomes far more visible once we look at these movements, initiatives, and campaigns
as a new constellation of political and cultural emancipatory meanings in an unevenly
globalized world. So far, such meanings have not yet conquered their self-reflexivity.
One of the purposes of this paper is to point to one possible path toward this end.
The other characteristic of transnational sub-politics, a negative one, is that, so
far, theories of separation have prevailed over theories of union among the great
variety of existing movements, campaigns, and initiatives. Indeed, truly global is only
the logic of hegemonic globalization, poised to keep them separate and mutually
unintelligible. For this reason, the notion of a counter-hegemonic globalization has a
strong utopian component, and its full meaning can only be grasped through indirect
procedures. I distinguish three main procedures: the sociology of absences, the theory
of translation and the Manifesto practices.
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The sociology of absences is the procedure through which what does not exist,
or whose existence is socially ungraspable or inexpressible, is conceived of as the
active result of a given social process. The sociology of absences invents or unveils
whatever social and political conditions, experiments, initiatives, conceptions have
been successfully suppressed by hegemonic forms of globalization; or, rather than
suppressed, have not been allowed to exist, to become pronounceable as a need or an
aspiration. In the specific case of counter-hegemonic globalization, the sociology of
absences is the procedure through which the incompleteness of particular anti-
hegemonic struggles, as well as the inadequacy of local resistance in a globalized
world, are constructed. Such incompleteness and inadequacy derives from the absent
(suppressed, unimagined, discredited) links that might connect such struggles with
other struggles elsewhere in the world, thus strengthening their potential to build
credible counter-hegemonic alternatives. The more expertly the sociology of absences
is performed, the greater the perception of incompleteness and inadequacy. At any
rate, the universal and the global constructed by the sociology of absences, far from
denying or eliminating the particular and the local, rather encourage them to envision
what is beyond them as a condition of their successful resistance and possible
alternatives.
Central to the sociology of absences is the notion that social experience is made
up of social inexperience. This is taboo for the dominant classes that promote
hegemonic capitalist globalization and its legitimizing cultural paradigm: on the one
hand, Eurocentric modernity or what Scott Lash calls high modernity (1999), on the
other, what I myself call celebratory postmodernity (1999b). The dominant classes
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have always taken as a given their particular experience of having to suffer the
consequences of the ignorance, baseness or dangerousness of the dominated classes.
Absent from their minds has always been their own inexperience of the suffering,
death, pillage, imposed as experience upon the oppressed classes, groups or peoples.3
For the latter, however, it is crucial to incorporate in their experience the inexperience
of the oppressors concerning the suffering, humiliation and exploitation imposed upon
the oppressed. The practice of sociology of absences is what endows counter-
hegemonic struggles with cosmopolitanism, that is, openness towards the other and
increased knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge Retamar has in mind when he
asserts: There is only one type of person who really knows in its entirety the literature
of Europe: the colonial (1989: 28).
To bring about such openness, it is necessary to resort to a second procedure: the
theory of translation. A given particular or local struggle (for instance, an indigenous
or feminist struggle) only recognizes another (for instance, an environment or labor
struggle) to the extent that both lose some of their particularism and localism. This
occurs as mutual intelligibility between struggles is created. Mutual intelligibility is a
prerequisite of what I would call the internal, self-reflexive mix of politics of equality
and politics of difference among movements, initiatives, campaigns, networks. It is the
lack of internal self-reflexivity that has allowed theories of separation to prevail over
theories of union. Some movements, initiatives, and campaigns rally around the
principle of equality, others around the principle of difference. The theory of
3 A brilliant exception is Montaignes essay on The Cannibals [1580 (1958)], written at the very beginning of Eurocentric modernity.
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translation is the procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility. Unlike a general
theory of transformative action, the theory of translation keeps intact the autonomy of
the struggles in question as condition for the translation, since only what is different
can be translated. To render mutually intelligible means to identify what unites and is
common to entities that are separate by their reciprocal differences. The theory of
translation permits to identify the common ground in an indigenous struggle, a
feminist struggle, an ecological struggle, etc., etc., without canceling out in any of
them the autonomy and difference that sustains them.
Once it is identified, what unites and is common to different anti-hegemonic
struggles becomes a principle of action only to the extent that it is identified as the
solution for the incompleteness and inadequacy of the struggles that remain confined
to their particularism and localism. This step occurs by means of the Manifesto
practices. I mean clear and unequivocal blueprints of alliances that are possible
because based on common denominators, and mobilizing because yielding a positive
sum, that is to say, because they grant specific advantages to all those participating in
them and according to their degree of participation.
Thus conceived, transnational emancipatory sub-politics or counter-hegemonic
globalization has demanding conditions. What one expects from it is a tense and
dynamic equilibrium between difference and equality, between identity and solidarity,
between autonomy and cooperation, between recognition and redistribution. The
success of the abovementioned procedures depends, therefore, on cultural, political,
and economic factors. In the eighties, the cultural turn contributed decisively to
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highlight the poles of difference, identity, autonomy, and recognition, but it often did
it in a culturalist way, that is to say, by playing down the economic and political
factors. Thus were the poles of equality, solidarity, cooperation, and redistribution
neglected. At the beginning of the new century, after almost twenty years of fierce
neoliberal globalization, the balance between the two poles must be retrieved. From
the perspective of an oppositional postmodernity, the idea that there is no recognition
without redistribution is central (Santos, 1998: 121-139). Perhaps the best way to
formulate this idea today is to resort to a modernist device, the notion of a fundamental
meta-right: the right to have rights. We have the right to be equal whenever difference
diminishes us; we have the right to be different whenever equality decharacterizes us.
We have here a normative hybrid: it is modernist because based on an abstract
universalism, but it is formulated in such a way as to sanction a postmodern opposition
based both on redistribution and recognition.
As I have already said, the new constellations of meaning at work in
transnational emancipatory sub-politics have not yet reached their self-reflexive
moment. That this moment must occur is, however, crucial to the reinvention of
political culture in the new century and millenium. The only way to encourage its
emergence is by excavating the ruins of the marginalized, suppressed or silenced
traditions upon which Eurocentric modernity built its own supremacy. They are
another another modernity (Lash, 1999).
To my mind, the Nuestra-America American Century has best formulated the
idea of social emancipation based on the meta-right to have rights and on the dynamic
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equilibrium between recognition and redistribution presupposed by it. It has also most
dramatically shown the difficulty of constructing successful emancipatory practices on
that basis.
The Nuestra America American Century
Nuestra America is the title of a short essay by Jos Mart, published in the
Mexican paper El Partido Liberal in January 30, 1891. In this article, which is an
excellent summary of Martian thinking to be found in several Latin American papers
at the time, Mart expresses the set of ideas which I believe were to preside over the
Nuestra-America American Century, a set of ideas later pursued, among many others,
by Marietegui and Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Ortiz and Darcy Ribeiro.
The main ideas in this agenda are as follows. First, Nuestra America is at the
antipodes of European America. It is the America mestiza founded at the often violent
crossing of much European, Indian, and African blood. It is the America that is
capable of delving deeply into its own roots and thereupon to edify a knowledge and a
government that are not imported, but rather adequate to its reality. Its deepest roots
are the struggle of the Amerindian peoples against their invaders, where we find the
true precursors of the Latin American independentistas (Retamar, 1989: 20). Asks
Mart: Is it not evident that America itself was paralysed by the same blow that
paralysed the Indian? And he answers: . . . Until the Indian is caused to walk,
America itself will not begin to walk well (1963,VIII: 336-337). Although in Nuestra
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America Mart deals mainly with anti-Indian racism, elsewhere he refers also to the
blacks: A human being is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black.
Cuban is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black . . . Two kinds of racist
would be equally guilty: the white racist and the black racist (1963, II: 299).
The second idea about Nuestra America is that on its mixed roots resides its
infinite complexity, its new form of universalism that made the world richer. Says
Mart: There is no race hatred because there are no races (1963, VI: 22). In this
sentence reverberates the same radical liberalism that had encouraged Simon Bolvar
to proclaim that Latin America was a small humankind, a miniature humankind.
This kind of situated and contextualized universalism was to become one of the most
enduring leitmotivs of Nuestra America.
In 1928, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade published his Anthropophagous
Manifesto. By anthropophagy he understood the American's capacity to devour all that
was alien to him and to incorporate all so as to create a complex identity, a new,
constantly changing identity: Only what is not mine interests me. The law of men.
The law of the anthropophagous . . . Against all importers of canned consciousness.
The palpable existence of life. Pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levy-Bruhl to study . . . I
asked a man what is law. He said it is the guarantee of the exercise of possibility.
This man's name was Galli Mathias. I swalled him. Anthropophagy. Absorption of
the sacred enemy. To turn him to totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality.
However, only the pure elites managed to accomplish carnal anthropophagy, the one
which carries with itself the highest meaning of life and avoids the evils identified by
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Freud, the catechetical evils (Andrade, 1990: 47-51). This concept of anthropophagy,
ironic it itself in relation to the European representation of the Carib instinct, is quite
close to the concept of transculturation developed by Fernando Ortiz in Cuba
somewhat later (1940) (Ortiz, 1973). For a more recent example, I quote the Brazilian
anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro in a burst of brilliant humour: It is quite easy to make
an Australia: take a few French, English, Irish, and Italian people, throw them in a
deserted island, they kill the Indians and make a second-rate England, damm it, or
third-rate, that shit. Brazil has to realize that that is shit, Canada is shit, because it just
repeats Europe. Just to show that ours is the adventure of making the new humankind,
mestizage in flesh and spirit. Mestizo is what is good. (1996: 104)
The third founding idea of Nuestra America is that for Nuestra America to be
built upon its most genuine foundations it has to endow itself with genuine knowledge.
Mart again: The trenches of ideas are worth more than the trenches of stone
(1963,VI: 16). But, to accomplish this, ideas must be rooted in the aspirations of the
oppressed peoples. Just as the authentic mestizo has conquered the exotic Creole . . .,
the imported book has been conquered in America by the natural man (1963,VI: 17).
Hence Marts appeal: The European university must yield to the American
university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter
perfect, even if that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught. Our own Greece is
preferable to that Greece that is not ours. We have greater need of it. National
politicians must replace foreign and exotic politicians. Graft the world into our
republics, but the trunk must be that of our republics. And let the conquered pedant be
silent: there is no homeland of which the individual can be more proud than our
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unhappy American republics (1963, VI: 18). This situated knowledge, which
demands a continuous attention to identity, behavior, and involvement in public life, is
truly what distinguishes a country, not the imperial attribution of levels of civilization.
Mart distinguishes the intellectual from the man whom lived life's experience has
made wise. He says: There is no fight between civilization and barbarism, rather
between false erudition and nature. (Mart, 1963, VI: 17)
Nuestra America thus carries a strong epistemological component. Rather than
importing foreign ideas, one must find out about the specific realities of the continent
from a Latin American perspective. Ignoring or disdaining them has helped tyrants to
acceed to power, as well as grounded the arrogance of the US vis--vis the rest of the
Continent. The contempt of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is the
major threat to Nuestra America; and he must know her urgently to stop disdaining
her. Being ignorant, he might perhaps covet her. Once he knew her, he would, out of
respect, take his hand off her. (Mart, 1963,VI: 22).
A situated knowledge is, therefore, condition for a situated government. As
Mart says elsewhere, one cannot rule new peoples with a singular and violent
composition, with laws inherited from four centuries of free practice in the United
States, and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. One does not stop the blow in
the chest of the plainsman's horse with one of Hamilton's decrees. One does not clear
the congealed blood of the Indian race with a sentence of Sieyes. And Mart adds: In
the republic of Indians, governors learn Indian (Mart, 1963,VI: 16-17).
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One fourth founding idea of Nuestra America is that it is Caliban's America, not
Prospero's. Prospero's America lies to the North, but it abides also in the South with
those intellectual and political elites who reject the Indian and black roots and look
upon Europe and the US as models to be imitated and upon their own countries with
the ethnocentric blinders that distinguish civilization and barbaric wilderness. Mart
has particularly in mind one of the earliest Southern formulations of Prospero's
America, the work of Argentinian Domingo Sarmiento, entitled Civilization and
Barbarism and published in 1845 (Sarmiento, 1966). It is against this world of
Prospero that Andrade pushes with his Carib instinct: However, not the Crusaders
came, rather the runaways from a civilization we are now eating up, for we are, strong
and vengeful like the Jabuti.... We did not have speculation. But we did have
divination. We had politics, which is the science of distribution. It is a social-
planetary system... Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered
happiness (Andrade, 1990: 47-51)
The fifth basic idea of Nuestra America is that its political thinking, far from
being nationalistic, is rather internationalistic, and is strengthened by an anti-
colonialist and anti-imperialist stance, aimed at Europe in the past and now at the
United States. Those who think that neoliberal globalization from NAFTA to the
Initiative for the Americas and the World Trade Organization is something new
should read Mart's reports on the Pan-American Congress of 1889-90 and the
American International Monetary Commission of 1891. Here are Mart's remarks on
the Pan-American Congress: Never in America, since independence, was there
subject matter demanding more wisdom, requiring more vigilance or calling for
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clearer and closer attention than the invitation that the powerful United States, filled
with unsalable products and determined to expand domination over America, address
to the American nations with less power, linked by free, Europe-friendly trade, to form
an alliance against Europe and cut off their contacts with the rest of the world.
America managed to get rid of Spain's tyranny; now, having looked with judicious
eyes upon the antecedents causes and factors of such an invitation, it is imperative to
state, because it is true, that the time has come for Spanish America to declare her
second independence. (1963,VI: 4-6).
According to Mart, the dominant conceptions in the US concerning Latin
America must incite the latter to distrust all proposals coming from the North.
Outraged, Mart accuses: They believe in necessity, the barbaric right, as the only
right, that this will be ours because we need it. They believe in incomparable
superiority of the 'anglo-saxon race as opposed to the latin race'. They believe in the
baseness of the negro race which they enslaved in the past and now-a-days humiliate,
and of the indian race, which they exterminate. They believe that the peoples of
Spanish America are mainly constituted of indians and negros (Mart, 1963, VI: 160).
The fact that Nuestra America and European America are geographically so
close, as well as the former's awareness of the dangers issuing from the power
imbalance between both, soon forced Nuestra America to claim her autonomy in the
form of a thought and a practice from the South: The North must be left behind
(Mart, 1963,II: 368). Mart's insight derives from his many years of exile in New
York, during which he became well acquainted with the monster's entrails: In the
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North there is no support nor root. In the North the problems increase and there is no
charity and patriotism to solve them. Here, men don't learn how to love one another,
nor do they love the soil where they are born by chance. Here was set up a machine
more deprived than can gratify universe craving for products. Here are piled up the
rich on one side and the desperate on the other. The North clams up and is full of
hatred. The North must be left behind (Mart, 1963, II: 368). It would be difficult to
find a more clairvoyant preview of the European American Century and the need to
create an alternative to it.
According to Mart, such an alternative resides in a united Nuestra America and
the assertion of her autonomy vis--vis the USA. In a text dated 1894, Mart writes:
Little is known about our sociology and about such precise laws as the following one:
the farther away they keep from the USA, the freer and more prosperous will the
peoples of America be (1963, VI: 26-27). More ambitious and utopic is Oswald de
Andrade's alternative: We want the Caribbean Revolution greater than the French
Revolution. One unification of all efficacious revolts on behalf of man. Without us,
Europe would not even have its poor declaration of the rights of man (Andrade,
1990: 48).
In sum, for Marti the claim of equality grounds the struggle against unequal
difference as much as the claim of difference grounds the struggle against the unequal
equality. The only legitimate cannibalization of difference (Andrades
anthropophagy) is the one of the subaltern because only through it can Caliban
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recognize his own difference vis-a-vis the unequal differences imposed upon him. In
other words, Andrades anthropophagous digests according to his own guts.
The Baroque Ethos: Prolegomena for a New Cosmopolitan Law
Nuestra America is no mere intellectual construct for discussion in the salons that
gave so much life to Latin American culture in the first decades of the twentieth
century. It is a political project, or rather, a set of political projects and a commitment
to the objectives therein contained. That was the commitment that dragged Mart to
exile and later to death fighting for Cuba's independence. As Oswald de Andrade was
to say epigrammatically: Against the vegetal elites. In contact with the soil
(Andrade, 1990: 49). But before it becomes a political project, Nuestra America is a
form of subjectivity and sociability. It is a way of being and living permanently in
transit and transitoriness, crossing borders, creating borderland spaces, used to risk
with which it has lived for many years, long before the invention of the risk society
(Beck, 1992) , used to endure a very low level of stabilization of expectations in the
name of a visceral optimism before collective potentiality. Such optimism led Mart to
assert in a period of fin de sicle Vienna cultural pessimism: A governor in a new
nation means a creator (1963,VI: 17). The same kind of optimism made Andrade
exclaim: Joy is counter proof (1990: 51).
The subjectivity and sociability of Nuestra America are uncomfortable with
institutionalized, legalistic thought and confortable with utopian thinking. By utopia I
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mean the exploration by imagination of new modes of human possibility and styles of
will, and the confrontation by imagination of the necessity of whatever exists just
because it exists on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for,
and to which humanity is fully entitled (Santos, 1995: 479). This style of subjectivity
and sociability is what I call, following Echeverria (1994), the baroque ethos.4
Whether as an artistic style or as an historical epoch, the baroque is most
specifically a Latin and Mediterranean phenomenon, an eccentric form of modernity,
the South of the North, so to speak. Its eccentricity derives, to a large extent, from the
fact that it occurred in countries and historical moments in which the center of power
was weak and tried to hide its weakness by dramatizing conformist sociability. The
relative lack of central power endows the baroque with an open-ended and unfinished
character that allows for the autonomy and creativity of the margins and peripheries.
Because of its eccentricity and exaggeration, the center reproduces itself as if it were a
margin. I mean a centrifugal imagination which becomes stronger as we go from the
internal peripheries of the European power to its external peripheries in Latin
America. The whole Latin America was colonized by weak centers, Portugal and
Spain. Portugal was a hegemonic center during a brief period of time, between the
fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and Spain started to decline but a century later.
From the seventeenth century onwards, the colonies were more or less left alone, a
marginalization that made possible a specific cultural and social creativity, now highly
codified, now chaotic, now erudite, now vernacular, now official, now illegal. Such
4 The baroque ethos I propound here is very different from Lashs Baroque melancholy (1999: 330). Our differences are due in part to the different loci of the baroque we base our analysis in, Europe in the case of Lash, Latin America in my case.
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mestizaje is so deeply rooted in the social practices of these countries that it came to be
considered as grounding a cultural ethos that is typically Latin-American and has
prevailed since the seventeenth century until today. This form of baroque, inasmuch
as it is the manifestation of an extreme instance of the center's weakness, constitutes a
privileged field for the development of a centrifugal, subversive, and blasphemous
imagination.
As an epoch in European history, the baroque is a time of crisis and transition. I
mean the economic, social and political crisis that is particularly obvious in the case of
the powers that fostered the first phase of European expansion. In Portugal's case, the
crisis implies even loss of independence. By issues of monarchic succession, Portugal
was annexed to Spain in 1580, and only regained its independence in 1640. Spanish
monarchy, particularly under Filipe IV (1621-1665), underwent a serious financial
crisis that was actually also a political and cultural crisis. As Maravall has pointed
out, it begins as a certain awareness of uneasiness and restlessness, which gets worse
as the social fabric is seriously affected (1990: 57). For instance, values and
behaviors are questioned, the structure of classes undergoes some changes, banditism
and deviant behavior in general increase, revolt and sedition are constant threats. It is
indeed a time of crisis, but a time also of transition towards new modes of sociability
made possible by the emergent capitalism and the new scientific paradigm, as well as
towards new modes of political domination based not only on coercion, but also on
cultural and ideological integration. To a large extent, baroque culture is one such
instrument of consolidation and legitimation of power. What nonetheless seems to me
inspiring in baroque culture is its grain of subversion and eccentricity, the weakness of
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the centers of power that look for legitimation in it, the space of creativity and
imagination it opens up, the turbulent sociability that it fosters. The configuration of
baroque subjectivity that I wish to advance here is a collage of diverse historical and
cultural materials, some of which in fact cannot be considered technically as belonging
to the baroque period.
Baroque subjectivity lives comfortably with the temporary suspension of order
and canons. As a subjectivity of transition, it depends both on the exhaustion and the
aspiration of canons; its privileged temporality is perennial transitoriness. It lacks the
obvious certainties of universal laws in the same way that baroque style lacked the
classical universalism of the Renaissance. Because it is unable to plan its own
repetition ad infinitum, baroque subjectivity invests in the local, the particular, the
momentary, the ephemeral and the transitory. But the local is not lived in a localist
fashion, that is, it is not experienced as an orthotopia; the local aspires, rather, to
invent another place, a heterotopia, if not even a utopia. Since it derives from a deep
feeling of emptiness and disorientation caused by the exhaustion of the dominant
canons, the comfort provided by the local is not the comfort of rest, but a sense of
direction. Again, we can observe here a contrast with the Renaissance, as Wlfflin has
taught us: In contrast to the Renaissance, which sought permanence and repose in
everything, the baroque had from the first moment a definite sense of direction
(Wlfflin, 1979: 67).
Baroque subjectivity is contemporaneous with all the elements that it integrates,
and hence contemptuous of modernist evolutionism. Thus, we might say, baroque
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temporality is the temporality of interruption. Interruption is important on two
accounts: it allows for reflexivity and surprise. Reflexivity is the self-reflexivity
required by the lack of maps (without maps to guide our steps, we must tread with
double care). Without self-reflexivity, in a desert of canons, the desert itself becomes
canonical. Surprise, in turn, is really suspense; it derives from the suspension
accomplished by interruption. By momentarily suspending itself, baroque subjectivity
intensifies the will and arouses the passion. The baroque technique, argues
Maravall, consists in suspending resolution so as to encourage it, after that
provisional and transitory moment of arrest, to push further more efficiently with the
help of those retained and concentrated forces (Maravall, 1990: 445).
Interruption provokes wonder and novelty, and impedes closure and
completion. Hence the unfinished and open-ended character of baroque sociability.
The capacity for wonder, surprise and novelty is the energy that facilitates the struggle
for an aspiration all the more convincing because it can never be completely fulfilled.
The aim of baroque style, says Wlfflin, is not to represent a perfect state, but to
suggest an incomplete process and a moment towards its completion (Wlfflin, 1979:
67).
Baroque subjectivity has a very special relationship with forms. The geometry
of baroque subjectivity is not Euclidean; it is fractal. Suspension of forms results from
the extreme uses to which they are put: Maravall's extremosidad (Maravall, 1990:
421). As regards baroque subjectivity, forms are the exercise of freedom par
excellence. The great importance of the exercise of freedom justifies that forms be
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treated with extreme seriousness, though the extremism may result in the destruction
of the forms themselves. The reason why Michelangelo is rightly considered one of
baroque's forefathers is, according to Wlfflin, because he treated forms with a
violence, a terrible seriousness which could only find expression in formlessness
(Wlfflin, 1979: 82). This is what Michelangelo's contemporaries called terribilit.
The extremism in the use of forms is grounded on a will to grandiosity that is also the
will to astound so well formulated by Bernini: Let no one speak to me of what is
small (Tapi, 1988, II: 188). Extremism may be exercised in many different ways, to
highlight simplicity or even asceticism as well as exuberance and extravagance, as
Maravall has pointed out. Baroque extremism allows for ruptures emerging out of
apparent continuities and keeps the forms in a permanently unstable state of
bifurcation, in Prigoggines terms (1996). One of the most eloquent examples is
Berninis The Mystical Ecstasy of Santa Teresa. In this sculpture, St. Teresas
expression is dramatized in such a way that the most intensely religious representation
of the saint is one with the profane representation of a woman enjoying a deep orgasm.
The representation of the sacred glides surreptitiously into the representation of the
sacrilegious. Extremism of forms alone allows baroque subjectivity to entertain the
turbulence and excitement necessary to continue the struggle for emancipatory causes,
in a world in which emancipation has been collapsed into or absorbed by hegemonic
regulation. To speak of extremism is to speak of archeological excavation into the
regulatory magma in order to retrieve emancipatory fires, no matter how dim.
The same extremism that produces forms, also devours them. This voracity
takes on two forms: sfumato and mestizaje. In baroque painting, sfumato is the
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blurring of outlines and colors amongst objects, as clouds and mountains, or the sea
and the sky. Sfumato allows baroque subjectivity to create the near and the familiar
among different intelligibilities, thus making cross-cultural dialogues possible and
desirable. For instance, only resorting to sfumato is it possible to give form to
configurations that combine Western human rights with other conceptions of human
dignity existing in other cultures (Santos,1999a). The coherence of monolithic
constructions disintegrates, its free-floating fragments remain open to new coherences
and inventions of new multicultural forms. Sfumato is like a magnet that attracts the
fragmentary forms into new constellations and directions, appealing to their most
vulnerable, unfinished, open-ended contours. Sfumato is, in sum, an antifortress
militancy.
Mestizaje, in its turn, is a way of pushing sfumato to its utmost, or extreme.
While sfumato operates through disintegration of forms and retrieval of fragments,
mestizaje operates through the creation of new forms of constellations of meaning,
which are truly unrecognizable or blasphemous in light of their constitutive fragments.
Mestizaje resides in the destruction of the logic that presides over the formation of
each of its fragments, and in the construction of a new logic. This productive-
destructive process tends to reflect the power relations among the original cultural
forms (that is, among their supporting social groups) and this is why baroque
subjectivity favors the mestizajes in which power relations are replaced by shared
authority (mestiza authority). Latin America has provided a particularly fertile soil for
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mestizaje, and so the region is one of the most important excavation sites for the
construction of baroque subjectivity.5
Sfumato and mestizaje are the two constitutive elements of what I call, following
Fernando Ortiz, transculturation. In his justly famous book, Contrapunteo Cubano,
originally published in 1940, Ortiz proposes the concept of transculturation to define
the synthesis of the utterly intricate cultural processes of deculturation and
neoculturation that have always characterized Cuban society. In his thinking, the
reciprocal cultural shocks and discoveries, which in Europe occurred slowly
throughout more than four millennia, occurred in Cuba by sudden jumps in less than
four centuries (1973: 131). The pre-Colombian transculturations between paleolitic
and neolitic Indians were followed by many others after the European hurricane
amongst various European cultures and between those ones and various African and
Asian cultures. According to Ortiz, what distinguishes Cuba since the sixteenth
century is the fact that all its cultures and peoples were all equally invaders,
exogenous, all of them torn apart from their original cradle, haunted by separation and
transplantation to a new culture being created (1973: 132). This permanent
maladjustment and transitoriness allowed for new cultural constellations which cannot
be reduced to the sum of the different fragments that contributed to them. The positive
character of this constant process of transition between cultures is what Ortiz
designates as transculturation. To reinforce this positive, new character, I prefer to
5 Among others see Pastor et al (1993); Alberro (1992). With reference to Brazilian baroque Coutinho (1990:16) speaks of a complex baroque mestiajem. Cf. also the concept of The Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) to express the mestizaje that characterizes black cultural experience, an experience that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean or British, but all of the them at one and the same time. In the Portuguese
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speak of sfumato instead of deculturation and mestizaje instead of neoculturation.
Transculturation designates, therefore, the voraciousness and extremism with which
cultural forms are processed by baroque sociability. This selfsame voraciousness and
selfsame extremism are also quite present in Oswald de Andrade's concept of
anthropophagy.
The extremism with which forms are lived by baroque subjectivity stresses the
rhetorical artifactuality of practices, discourses, and modes of intelligibility. Artifice
(artificium) is the foundation of a subjectivity suspended among fragments. Artifice
allows baroque subjectivity to reinvent itself whenever the sociabilities it leads to tend
to transform themselves into micro-orthodoxies. Through artifice, baroque
subjectivity is ludic and subversive at one time, as the baroque feast so well illustrates.
The importance of the feast in baroque culture, both in Europe and in Latin America,
is well documented.6 The feast turned baroque culture into the first instance of mass
culture of modernity. Its ostentatious and celebratory character was used by political
and ecclesiastical powers to dramatize their greatness and reinforce their control over
the masses. However, through its three basic components disproportion, laughter
and subversion the baroque feast is invested with an emancipatory potential.
The baroque feast is out of proportion: it requires an extremely large investment
which, however, is consumed in an extremely fleeting moment and an extremely
limited space. As Maravall says, abundant and expensive means are used, a
speaking world, the Anthropophagous Manifest of Oswald de Andrade remains the most striking exemplar of mestizaje.
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considerable effort is exerted, ample preparations are made, a complicated apparatus is
set up, all that only to obtain some extremely short-lived effects, whether in the form
of pleasure or surprise (Maravall, 1990: 488). Nevertheless, disproportion generates a
special intensification that, in turn, gives rise to the will to motion, the tolerance for
chaos and the taste for turbulence, without which the struggle for the paradigmatic
transition cannot take place.
Disproportion makes wonder, surprise, artifice and novelty possible. But above
all, it makes playful distance and laughter possible. Because laughter is not easily
codifiable, capitalist modernity declared war on mirth, and so laughter was considered
frivolous, improper, eccentric, if not blasphemous. Laughter was to be admitted only
in highly codified contexts of the entertainment industry. This phenomenon can also
be observed among modern anticapitalist social movements (labor parties, unions and
even the new social movements) that banned laughter and play, lest they subvert the
seriousness of resistance. Particularly interesting is the case of unions, whose
activities at the beginning had a strong ludic and festive element (workers' feasts)
which, however, was gradually suffocated, until at last union activity became deadly
serious and deeply antierotic. The banishment of laughter and play is part of what
Max Weber calls the Entzuberung of the modern world.
The reinvention of social emancipation, which I suggest can be achieved by
delving into baroque sociability, aims at the reenchantment of common sense, which
in itself presupposes the carnivalization of emancipatory social practices and the
6 On the baroque feast in Mexico see Leon (1993), and in Brazil (Minas Gerais) see vila (1994). The relationship between the feast, particularly the baroque feast, and utopian thinking remains to be explored. On
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eroticism of laughter and play. As Oswald de Andrade said: Joy is counter proof
(1990: 51). The carnivalization of emancipatory social practice has an important self-
reflexive dimension: it makes the decanonization and subversion of such practices
possible. A decanonizing practice which does not know how to decanonize itself, falls
easily into orthodoxy. Likewise, a subversive activity which does not know how to
subvert itself, falls easily into regulatory routine.
And now, finally, the third emancipatory feature of the baroque feast:
subversion. By carnivalizing social practices, the baroque feast displays a subversive
potential that increases as the feast distances itself from the centers of power, but that
is always there, even when the centers of power themselves are the promoters of the
feast. Little wonder, then, that this subversive feature was much more noticeable in
the colonies. Writing about carnival in the 1920's, the great Peruvian intellectual
Marietegui asserted that, even though it had been appropriated by the bourgeoisie,
carnival was indeed revolutionary, because, by turning the bourgeois into a wardrobe,
it was a merciless parody of power and the past (Marietegui [1925-1927], 1974: 127).
Garcia de Leon also describes the subversive dimension of baroque feasts and
religious processions in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in the seventeenth century. Up
front marched the highest dignitaries of the viceroyalty in their full regalia
politicians, clergymen and military men; at the end of the procession followed the
populace, mimicking their betters in gesture and attire, and thus provoking laughter
and merriment among the spectators (Leon, 1993). This symmetrical inversion of the
beginning and end of the procession is a cultural metaphor for the upside-down world
the relationship between fouririsme and la socit festive, see Desroche (1975).
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el mundo al revs which was typical of Vera Cruz sociability at the time:
mulattas dressed up as queens, slaves in silk garments, whores pretending to be
honest women and honest women pretending to be whores; Africanized Portuguese
and Indianized Spaniards.7 The same mundo al revs is celebrated by Oswald de
Andrade in his Anthropophagous Manifesto: But we have never admitted to the birth
of logic among us . . . Only where there is mystery is there no determinism. But what
have we to do with this? We have never been catechized. We live in a sleepwalking
law. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belm-Par (Andrade, 1990: 48).
In the feast, subversion is codified, in that it transgresses order while knowing
the place of order and not questioning it, but the code itself is subverted by the
sfumatos between feast and daily sociability. In the peripheries, transgression is
almost a necessity. It is transgressive because it does not know how to be order, even
as it knows that order exists. That is why baroque subjectivity privileges margins and
peripheries as fields for the reconstruction of emancipatory energies.
All these characteristics turn the sociability generated by baroque subjectivity
into a subcodified sociability: somewhat chaotic, inspired by a centrifugal
imagination, positioned between despair and vertigo, this is a kind of sociability that
celebrates revolt and revolutionizes celebration. Such sociability cannot but be
emotional and passionate, the feature that most distinguishes baroque subjectivity
from high modernity, or first modernity in Lashs terms (1999). High modern
7 vila concurs, stressing the mixture of religious and heathan motifs: Amongst hords of negroes playing bagpipes, drums, fifes and trumpets, there would be, for example, an excellent German impersonator tearing apart the silence of the air with the loud sound of a clarinet, while the believers devoutly carried religious banners or images (1994: 56).
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rationality, particularly after Descartes, condemns the emotions and the passions as
obstacles to the progress of knowledge and truth. Cartesian rationality, says Toulmin,
claims to be intellectually perfectionist, morally rigorous and humanly unrelenting
(Toulmin, 1990: 198). Not much of human life and social practice fits into such a
conception of rationality, but it is nonetheless quite attractive to those who cherish the
stability and hierarchy of universal rules. Hirschman, in his turn, has clearly shown
the elective affinities between this form of rationality and emergent capitalism.
Inasmuch as the interests of people and groups began centering around economic
advantage, the interests that before had been considered passions became the opposite
of passions and even the tamers of passion. From then on, says Hirschman, in the
pursuit of their interests men were expected or assumed to be steadfast, single-minded
and methodical, in total contrast to the stereotyped behavior of men who are buffeted
and blinded by their passions (Hirshman, 1964: 54). The objective was, of course, to
create a one dimensional human personality. And Hirschman concludes: [I]n sum,
capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its
worst feature (1964:132).
Cartesian and capitalist recipes are of little use for the reconstruction of a
human personality with the capacity and desire for social emancipation. The meaning
of the emancipatory struggles at the beginning of the twenty-first century can neither
be deduced from demonstrative knowledge nor from an estimate of interests. Thus,
the excavation undertaken by baroque subjectivity in this domain, more than in any
other, must concentrate on suppressed or eccentric traditions of modernity,
representations that occurred in the physical or symbolic peripheries where the control
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of hegemonic representations was weaker the Vera Cruzes of modernity or
earlier, more chaotic representations of modernity that occurred before the Cartesian
closure. For example, baroque subjectivity looks for inspiration in Montaigne and the
concrete and erotic intelligibility of his life. In his essay On Experience, after
saying that he hates remedies that are more troublesome than the disease, Montaigne
writes: To be a victim of the colic and to subject oneself to abstinence from the
pleasure of eating oysters, are two evils instead of one. The disease stabs us on one
side, the diet on the other. Since there is the risk of mistake let us take it, for
preference, in the pursuit of pleasure. The world does the opposite, and considers
nothing to be useful that is not painful; facility rouses suspicions (Montaigne, 1958:
370).
As Cassirer (1960; 1963) and Toulmin (1990) have shown for the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment respectively, each era creates a subjectivity that is congruent
with the new intellectual, social, political, and cultural challenges. The baroque ethos
is the building block of a form of subjectivity and sociability interested in and capable
of confronting the hegemonic forms of globalization, thereby opening the space for
counter-hegemonic possibilities. Such possibilities are not fully developed and cannot
by themselves promise a new era. But they are consistent enough to provide the
grounding for the idea that we are entering a period of paradigmatic transition, an in-
between era and therefore an era that is eager to follow the impulse of mestizaje,
sfumato, hybridization and all the other features that I have attributed to the baroque
ethos, and hence to Nuestra America. The progressive credibility conquered by the
forms of subjectivity and sociability nurtured by such ethos will gradually translate
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into new interstitial normativities. Both Mart and Andrade have in mind a new kind of
law and a new kind of rights. For them the right to be equal involves the right to be
different, as the right to be different involves the right to be equal. Andrades
metaphor of anthropophagy is a call for such a complex interlegality. It is formulated
from the perspective of subaltern difference, the only other recognized Eurocentric
high modernity. The interstitial normative fragments we collect in Nuestra America
will provide the seeds for a new natural law, a cosmopolitan law, a law from below,
to be found in the streets where survival and creative transgression fuse in an
everyday-life pattern.
In the following I will elaborate on this new normativity in which redistribution
and recognition come together to build the new emancipatory blueprints which I have
called New Manifestos. But before that I want to dwell for a moment on the difficulties
confronted by the Nuestra American project throughout the twentieth century. They
will help to illuminate the emancipatory tasks ahead.
Counter-Hegemony in the Twentieth Century
The Nuestra America American Century was a century of counter-hegemonic
possibilities, many of them following the tradition of others in the nineteenth century
after the independence of Haiti in 1804. Amongst such possibilities, we might count
the Mexican Revolution of 1910; the Indigenous movement headed by Quintin Lame
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in Colombia,1914; the Sandinist movement in Nicaragua in the 1920's and 1930's, and
its triumph in the 1980s; the radical democratization of Guatemala in 1944; the rise of
Peronism in 1946; the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959; Allende's rise to
power in 1970; the Landless Movement in Brazil since the 1980's; the Zapatist
Movement since 1994.
The overwhelming majority of these emancipatory experiences were aimed
against the European American Century or, at least, had for background the latters
political ambitions and hegemonic ideas. Indeed, the American, neoliberal, hegemonic
globalization, which now-a-days spreads throughout the entire globe, had its training
field in Nuestra America since the beginning of the century. Not allowed to be the
New World on the same footing with European America, Nuestra America was forced
to be the Newest World of the European America. This poisoned privilege turned
Nuestra America into a fertile field of cosmopolitan, emancipatory, counter-
hegemonic experiences, as exhilarating as painful, as radiant in their promises as
frustrating in their fulfillments.
What failed and why in the Nuestra America American Century? It would be
silly to propose an inventory before such an open future as ours. Nonetheless, I'll risk
a few thoughts, which actually claim to account more for the future than the past. In
the first place, to live in the monsters entrails is no easy matter. It does allow for a
deep knowledge of the beast, as Mart so well demonstrates, but, on the other hand, it
makes it very difficult to come out alive, even when one heeds Mart's admonishment:
The North must be left behind (Mart, 1963,II: 368). In my way of thinking,
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Nuestra America has been doubly living in the monster's entrails: because it shares
with European America the continent that the latter had always conceived of as its
vital space and zone of privileged influence; because, as Mart says in Nuestra
America, nuestra America is the working America (1963,VI: 23) and, thus, in its
relations with European America, it shares the same tensions and sorrows that plague
the relations between workers and capitalists. In this latter sense, Nuestra America has
failed no more, no less than the workers of all the world in their struggle against
capital.
My second thought is that Nuestra America did not have to fight only against the
imperial visits of its northern neighbor. The latter took over and became at home in
the South, not just socializing with the natives but becoming a very native in the form
of local elites and their transnational alliances with US interests. The Southern
Prospero was present in Sarmiento's political-cultural project, in the interests of
agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie, specially after World War II, in the military
dictatorships of the 60s and 70s, in the fight against the communist threat, and in the
drastic neoliberal structural adjustment. In this sense, Nuestra America had to live
trapped in and dependent of European America, just like Caliban vis--vis Prospero.
That is why Latin American violence has taken the form of civil war much more often
than the form of the Bay of Pigs.
The third thought concerns the absence of hegemony in the counter-hegemonic
field. While it is a crucial instrument of class domination in complex societies, the
concept of hegemony is equally crucial inside the struggles against such domination.
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Among the oppressed or dominated groups one must emerge, capable of converting its
specific interests in liberation into the common interests of all the oppressed and thus
become hegemonic. Gramsci, we recall, was convinced that the workers constituted
the group in question. We do know that things did not happen like that in the
capitalist world, less so today than in Gramscis own time, and far less so in Nuestra
America than in Europe or European America. Indigenous, peasants, workers,
pettibourgeois, black movements and struggles always occurred in isolation,
antagonizing one another, ever without a theory of translation and devoid of the
Manifesto practices referred to above. One of the weaknesses of Nuestra America,
actually quite obvious in Mart's work, was to overestimate the communality of
interests and the possibilities of uniting around them. Rather than uniting, Nuestra
America underwent a process of Balkanization. Before this fragmentation, the union
of European America became more efficacious. European America united around the
idea of national identity and manifest destiny: a promised land destined to fulfill its
promises at any cost for the outsiders.
My final thought concerns the cultural project of Nuestra America itself. To my
mind, contrary to Mart's wishes, the European and North American university never
gave entirely way to the American University. As witness the pathetic bovarism of
writers and scholars . . . which leads some Latin American . . . to imagine themselves
as exiled metropolitans. For them, a work produced in their immediate orbit . . .
merits their interest only when it has received the metropolis' approval, an approval
that gives them the eyes with which to see it (Retamar, 1989: 82). Contrary to Ortiz's
claim, transculturation was never total, and in fact it was undermined by power
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differences among the different components that contributed to it. For a very long
time, and perhaps more so today at a time of vertiginous deterritorialized
transculturation in the guise of hybridization, the questions about the inequality of
power remained unanswered: who hybridizes whom and what? With what results?
And in whose benefit? What, in the process of transculturation, did not go beyond
deculturation or sfumato and why? If indeed it is true that most cultures were
invaders, it is no less true that some invaded as masters, some as slaves. It is perhaps
not risky today, sixty years later, to think that Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagous
optimism was exaggerated: But no Crusaders came. Only runaways from a
civilization which we are eating up, because we are strong and vengeful like the
Jabuti (Andrade, 1990: 50).
The European American Century ended triumphantly, the protagonist of the last
incarnation of the capitalist world system hegemonic globalization. On the
contrary, the Nuestra America American Century ended sorrowfully. Latin America
has imported many of the evils that Mart had seen in the monster's entrails, and the
enormous emancipatory creativity it has demonstrated as witness the Zapata and
Sandino movements, the indigenous and peasant movements, Allende in 1970 and
Fidel in 1959, the social movements, the ABC trade unions movement, the
participatory budgeting in many Brazilian cities, the landless movement, the Zapatist
movement either ended in frustration or face an uncertain future. This uncertainty is
all the greater since it is foreseeable that extreme polarization in the distribution of
world wealth during the last decades, should it go on, will require an even more
despotic system of repression worldwide than what exists now. With remarkable
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forethought, Darcy Ribeiro wrote in 1979: The means of repression required to
maintain this system threaten to impose upon all the peoples such rigid and
despotically efficient regimes as are without parallel in the history of iniquity (1979:
40). It comes as no surprise that the intellectual and social climate of Latin America
has been invaded in the past decades by a wave of cynical reason, a cultural pessimism
utterly unrecognizable from the point of view of Nuestra America.
Counter-Hegemonic Possibilities for the Twenty-First Century: Towards
New Manifestos
In the light of the preceeding, the question must be asked whether Nuestra
America has in fact conditions to continue to symbolize a utopian will to emancipation
and counter-hegemonic globalization, based on the mutual implication of equality and
difference. My answer is positive but depending on the following condition: Nuestra
America must be deterritorialized and turned into the metaphor for the struggle of the
victims of hegemonic globalization wherever they may be, North or South, East or
West. If we revisit the founding ideas of Nuestra America, we observe that the
transformations of the last decades have created conditions for them to occur and
flourish today in other parts of the world. Let us examine some of them. First, the
exponential increase of trans-border interactions of emigrants, students, refugees,
as well as executives, tourists is giving rise to new forms of mestizaje,
anthropophagy and transculturation all over the world. The world becomes
increasingly a world of invaders cut off from an origin they never had or, if they did,
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they suffered therein the original experience of being invaded. Against celebratory
postmodernism, more attention must be paid than that paid in the first century of
Nuestra America to the power of the different participants in the processes of
mestizaje. Such inequalities accounted for the perversion both of the politics of
difference (recognition became a form of miscognition) and the politics of equality
(redistribution ended up as the new forms of poor relief advocated by the World Bank
and IMF).
Second, the recent ugly revival of racism in the North points to an aggressive
defense against the unstoppable construction of the multiple little humankinds Bolivar
talked about, where races cross and interpenetrate in the margins of repression and
discrimination. As the Cuban, in Mart's voice, could proclaim to be more than black,
mulatto or white, so the South African, the Mozambican, the New Yorker, the
Parisian, the Londoner can proclaim today to be more than black, white, mulatto,
Indian, Kurd, Arab, etc., etc. Third, the demand to produce or sustain situated and
contextualized knowledge is today a global claim against the ignorance and silencing
effect produced by modern science as it is used by hegemonic globalization. This
epistemological issue gained enormous relevance in recent times with the newest
developments of biotechnology and genetic engineering and the consequent struggle
to defend biodiversity from biopiracy. In this domain, Latin America, one of the great
holders of biodiversity, continues to be the home of Nuestra America but many other
countries are in this position, in Africa or Asia. Fourth, as hegemonic globalization
deepened, the entrails of the monster have gotten closer to many other peoples in
other continents. The closeness effect is today produced by information and
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communication capitalism and by consumer society. Hereby are multiplied both the
grounds for the cynical reason and the postcolonial impulse. No other counter-
hegemonic internationalism seems to loom in the horizon but the chaotic and
fragmentary internationalisms have become part of our quotidian. In a word, the new
Nuestra America has today conditions to globalize itself and thereby propose new
emancipatory alliances to the old Nuestra America since localized.
The counter-hegemonic nature of Nuestra America lies in its potential to develop
a progressive transnational political culture. Such political culture will concentrate on
(1) identifying the multiple local/global linkages among struggles, movements and
initiatives; (2) promoting the clashes between hegemonic globalization trends and
pressures, on one side, and the transnational coalitions to resist against them, on the
other, thus opening up possibilities for counter-hegemonic globalizations; (3)
promoting internal and external self-reflexivity so that the forms of redistribution and
recognition that are established among the movements mirror the forms of
redistribution and recognition that transnational emancipatory sub-politics wishes to
see implemented in the world.
Towards New Manifestos
In 1998 the Communist Manifesto celebrated its 150th anniversary. The
Manifesto is one of the landmark texts of western modernity. In a few pages and with
unsurpassing clarity, Marx and Engels offer there a global view of society in their own
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time, a general theory of historical development, and a short- and long-term political
program. The Manifesto is a Eurocentric document that conveys an unswerving faith
in progress, acclaims the bourgeoisie as the revolutionary class that made it possible,
and by the same token prophesizes the defeat of the bourgeoisie vis--vis the
proletariat as the emergent class capable of guaranteeing the continuity of progress
beyond bourgeois limits.
Some of the themes, analyses and appeals included in the Manifesto are
nowadays still up-to-date. However, Marx's prophecies were never fulfilled.
Capitalism did not succumb at the hands of the enemies by itself created and the
communist alternative failed utterly. Capitalism globalized itself far more effectively
than the proletarian movement, while the latter's successes, namely in the more
developed countries, consisted in humanizing, rather than overcoming, capitalism.
Nonetheless, the social evils denounced by the Manifesto are today as grievous
as then. The progress meanwhile achieved went hand in hand with wars that killed
and go on killing millions of people, and the gap between the rich and the poor has
never before been so wide as today. As I mentioned above, facing such reality, I
believe that it is necessary to create the conditions for not one but several new
Manifestos to emerge, with the potential to mobilize all the progressive forces of the
world. By progressive forces are meant all those unreconciled with the spread of
societal fascism, which they do not see as inevitable, and who therefore go on fighting
for alternatives. The complexity of the contemporary world and the increasing
visibility of its large diversity and inequality render impossible the translation of
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principles of action into one single manifesto. I have therefore in mind several
manifestos, each one of them opening up possible paths toward an alternative society
vis--vis societal fascism.
Moreover, unlike the Communist Manifesto, the new manifestos will not be the
achievement of individual scientists observing the world from one privileged
perspective alone. Rather, they will be far more multicultural and indebted to different
paradigms of knowledge, and will emerge, by virtue of translation, networking, and
mestizage, in conversations of humankind (John Dewe
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